Obamacare fight erupts in deep-blue Maryland

Maryland gubernatorial candidate Doug Gansler is incensed over the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act. He’s aghast at chronic problems with Maryland’s online enrollment platform and stunned that a state with “literally the smartest people in the country” would have hired a company from North Dakota, of all places, to help put its exchange in place. The whole spectacle, Gansler fumes, “is almost like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit.”

The punch line: Gansler, Maryland’s current attorney general, is a Democrat.

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Washington has been locked for months in a series of partisan battles over the law known as Obamacare, as well as battles within the GOP over how best to oppose the ACA. But it’s the state just to the north that has served up the country’s first Democrat-on-Democrat brawl over the inept implementation of the law, offering perhaps a first test of Democratic voters’ patience with the ACA’s technical setbacks.

In Maryland, the fight to succeed outgoing Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley has pitted Gansler against state Del. Heather Mizeur and Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, who chairs the state panel on ACA implementation and has long presented himself as the O’Malley administration’s point man on Obamacare.

After vowing to make deep-blue Maryland an ACA success story, Brown — and O’Malley — watched with dismay as the website for the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange foundered, allowing fewer than 4,000 Marylanders to enroll in insurance plans by the end of November. The executive director of the state exchange resigned at the start of December.

Now, as O’Malley and his appointees have scrambled to get the state exchange back on track, Gansler has laced into Brown over the performance of the state exchange, arguing that it has “failed miserably” and given “fodder for Republicans” who want to scrap the ACA altogether. Having spent months mocking Brown as an empty suit, Gansler points to the health care mess as a case in point.

“Brown and others were so boastful about Maryland leading the country, [but] here we are behind such states as Nevada and Kentucky, let alone California and states like that,” Gansler said, emphasizing that while he is a supporter of the president and the ACA: “I think it’s certainly appropriate for Democrats to question what has gone on in individual states regarding people’s ability to enroll in an exchange.”

In some respects, the Maryland race is a unique one: No other state on the 2014 map features an open-seat contest for the heart of the Democratic base between two major candidates, one of whom was directly tasked with implementing a state health care exchange. For health care reform critics, Gansler is an obviously imperfect messenger, a combative politician who replaced his campaign manager last week in an effort to steady his listing bid for governor.

Even still, the success or failure of Gansler’s biting message could reveal just how frustrated — or how serenely patient — rank-and-file Democrats may be with the progress of a law that was supposed to cement a new era of activist government. There’s little chance of a competitive general election in Democratic Maryland, but success by Gansler could also presumably cheer Republicans who have put the ACA’s implementation woes front and center for their 2014 message.

This was never the way Gansler planned to come out swinging in the governor’s race. An early Barack Obama 2008 endorser who started the year as a seeming favorite to succeed O’Malley, his campaign suffered a string of body blows throughout the summer that have left him as an unexpected underdog to Brown.

First there was the recording that surfaced in The Washington Post, capturing Gansler dismissing Brown, who is black, for relying on his race as a campaign asset (Gansler’s campaign called the recording a dirty trick). Then there was a Post story on accusations that Gansler ordered his state trooper detail to violate traffic laws (a charge Gansler also chalked up to political skulduggery). Most embarrassing was an ABC News report featuring photos of Gansler at a raucous high school beach party featuring apparent underage drinking. (Gansler said he was only there to tell his son what time their family would leave the area the following morning.)

Brown, meanwhile, has rolled up support from a host of unions and prominent elected officials, including O’Malley, Sens. Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and U.S. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.

Even with all that weighing on his campaign, bashing Obamacare — even just on the details of implementation — is a striking turn of events for Gansler, an Obama stalwart who fought in court to uphold the constitutionality of the president’s signature achievement.

Asked whether his ACA attacks were merely an attempt to turn the page for his campaign, Gansler said he had “a rough rollout because of political dirty tricks on the part of the Brown campaign,” but called health care the real issue in the race.

Brown, a former state legislator and Iraq War veteran, declined POLITICO’s request for an interview and has in general shied away from engaging attacks from Gansler and others.

Justin Schall, Brown’s campaign manager, shrugged off Gansler’s ACA criticism as opportunistic and faulted Gansler for taking potshots on the ACA now, despite having done little to help with implementation as part of the advisory committee that Brown chairs.

“As attorney general, Doug Gansler is a member of the Health Care Reform Council, and he hasn’t bothered to shown up to a meeting in the last two years, so it’s a little disingenuous when Doug opines on the importance of Obamacare,” Schall said. “When input on health care reform was needed, Gansler was nowhere to be found, and now Doug hopes people will forget his absence as he attacks a fellow Democrat on ACA.”